


The Wide and Starry Sky

by roboticonography



Category: Agent Carter (Marvel Short Film), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 17:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1908225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roboticonography/pseuds/roboticonography
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early days of starting up SHIELD, Peggy and Howard fly supplies into West Berlin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wide and Starry Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Tumblr user peggylives for the Carter Century prompt exchange. My prompt was "Catch and release, the Berlin Blockade." 
> 
> Things to be aware of:
> 
> 1\. I played it pretty fast and loose with the prompt.  
> 2\. Not entirely TWS-compliant (though it isn't completely wide of the mark either).  
> 3\. Officially Not My Areas of Expertise: The Cold War. Aircraft. Spycraft. German geography.

Peggy arrived at work one morning to find Howard's office so full of smoke that the air parted like a curtain when she opened the door.

 

There was very little about this that struck Peggy as irregular, and that fact gave her pause to wonder whether she ought to revisit the path her career had taken.

 

“You have a window, for God's sake,” she called out—then regretted the action, as it caused her to have to take in a breath.

 

“Good, you're here!” he trilled back, ominously chipper.

 

They were, at that time, renting a not-overly-prepossessing premises that had formerly been a secretarial school; the layout was such that there was one large office obviously reserved for the head of the school, and three smaller, satellite offices for employees. The rest of the space was devoted to a bullpen, where typists would have trained, and where desks had been installed for the budding intelligence agents they would (hopefully) soon acquire.

 

When they had moved into the school, Howard, typically oblivious, had unilaterally decided to occupy the head office, without bothering to inquire whether anyone else might have a use for it.

 

This suited Peggy well enough; her ego didn’t need any stroking, and Howard had the lion's share of bric-a-brac. He was a bit compulsive, insisting that he needed everything to hand all at once—his bits of wire, and his books, and his models, and his scraps of paper with half-formed thoughts scribbled on them.

 

Peggy, by contrast, preferred an ordered workspace to go with her orderly mind. Her desk was always tidy, her files neatly pigeonholed at the end of every day, or transferred to the cabinets in the file room. She could be packed within five minutes, ready to leave without a trace if it came to that. Living through the Blitz had taught her to view all homes as temporary, all possessions as fleeting, and to always carry with her the things she absolutely needed.

 

Peggy crossed to the aforementioned window and threw up the sash, letting in a gust of slightly less stale air from the street. “Have you been here since last night?”

 

“Had a call from a fellow in Wiesbaden. Air Force. I’ve got the name… somewhere.” He inserted his pen under a rather precarious stack of papers, and lifted them up to peek underneath.

 

“Oh, look, a desk,” Peggy said dryly.

 

Howard was too wound up to take any notice of her ribbing. “They’re on the hunt for aircraft that can carry three tons or more, and someone introduced my name into the conversation.”

 

“Berlin?”

 

He nodded.

 

In the wake of Stalin cutting off overland supply routes, the British and American forces had organized a joint airlift operation to get food and other necessities into West Berlin. The Americans had called their part of the mission ‘Operation Vittles.’ The British, with characteristic aplomb, had dubbed theirs ‘Operation Plane Fare.’

 

“I told them they could have my plane, on one condition.”

 

“That you'd be the pilot?”

 

He touched a finger to his nose. “Bingo.”

 

“How on earth did you get them to agree to that?”

 

“They didn't, at first. Told me I had to have an experienced flight officer on deck. That's fine, I told them. I have an old war buddy who used to be in the Special Air Service.”

 

For a blindly optimistic moment, Peggy waited for him to say a name. None was forthcoming, of course.

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

“Peggy...”

 

“Under no circumstances,” she said firmly. “What great thundering idiot let you talk him into this? Honestly! You need a trained pilot. The SAS didn’t fly planes, we jumped out of them.”

 

He grinned. “That might come in handy too.”

 

She picked up a file from his desk and swatted him on the ear. “Don’t you think I have enough opportunities to get shot at?”

 

“You’d rather sit around here doing paperwork?”

 

“You’re an ass,” Peggy told him, and walked out.

 

Truth be told, though, he wasn’t wrong.

 

*

  

It was strange, flying over Germany. Part of it was the empty sky, the lack of noise from any engines but their own. It also had to do with the fact that she was in civilian clothes. Peggy had dressed as practically and comfortably as possible: slacks, sensible quarter brogues, a belted mackintosh, a black felt beret, and a fantastic yellow and green scarf that would have been considered a frivolous waste of fabric during wartime. These days, she owned dozens of dresses and suits, her closet as vibrantly colourful as a tropical bird. She was determined never to wear olive, brown, or grey again as long as she lived.

 

The drop went surprisingly smoothly. In addition to the food and supplies, Peggy gave away all of her cigarettes—and, on a whim, her scarf, to a woman who admired it. Howard had brought chocolate coins and peppermint chewing gum for the children—a gesture of surprising thoughtfulness that made Peggy wish she'd done the same. They took on some packages, mostly mail, before heading back.

 

The sky was dark as they ascended. “I’m going to try and get on top of it,” Howard told her, “but it might get a little rough.”

 

‘A little rough’ turned out to be something of an understatement.

 

Peggy was not inclined to airsickness, but after a few hard rolls her stomach began to protest.

 

“You might have to exercise your SAS training after all,” Howard shouted.

 

The plane banked so suddenly and sharply that for a second Peggy thought they'd been hit. She was tossed forward in her straps, a white-hot lightning bolt of pain forking through her neck and shoulder.

 

She called back, “Frightful bad luck to jump without any ciggies!” putting on a blithe, schoolgirlish air to mask the creeping terror.

 

The pain in her shoulder had a keen, blinding edge, and she couldn’t tell which way was up anymore.

 

Peggy closed her eyes and thought of Steve, wondering whether they might see each other soon. She tried to focus on that, on Steve. Not for the first time, she itemized her losses: his fine, restless hands; the way he squinted when he smiled; the way his hair, if left untamed, tumbled boyishly over his brow. The softness of his mouth against hers, the one and only time they'd kissed, and the little sound of surprise he’d made. His gentleness, his kindness, his bravery and stubbornness.

 

Peggy didn’t know whether she believed in a hereafter, but if such a thing existed, she couldn’t think of a single person more deserving of heaven than Steve Rogers. 

 

When she opened her eyes again, they had broken through the roiling storm to the crisp blue sky above.

 

 _I'm sorry, darling,_ she thought. _Our dance will have to wait._

 

*

 

The rest of the flight went off without a hitch, the landing smooth as silk.

 

“That was fun,” said Howard, apparently without irony.

 

“ _Fun_?” Peggy echoed incredulously. “We almost _died_!” Her head and her shoulder were throbbing synchronously.

 

“Every day above ground is a good one,” said Howard, who never seemed to lack for colourful aphorisms.

 

Peggy thought of Steve, neither above ground nor below it.  _Lost_  was harder to bear than  _dead_ , in a lot of ways. At least with dead there were rituals, actions one could take, a place to visit the beloved and pay respects. 

 

Lost meant never being certain that you had looked hard enough.

 

As Peggy picked up her attaché case, she could hear something rattling inside. Glass.

 

Once she was on the runway, she set the case down and opened it, then carefully slid Steve’s picture out of the broken frame. It had a bent corner, and a small scratch in the area of Steve’s shoulder, but was otherwise undamaged. Hoping to escape Howard’s keen eyes, she tucked the snapshot quickly into the interior breast pocket of her mack. _Here he lies where he long’d to be_ , she thought, with inappropriate—but not unwelcome—levity. It wasn’t until much later that she connected the quote to its source.

 

“I could laminate him,” said Howard, with a gentleness that surprised her. “If you plan to keep carting him around with you.”

 

“I do,” Peggy replied, her voice brittle. “But that’s quite all right. Thank you.”

 

She found she didn’t mind, after all, if the photo got a little careworn. Memories weren’t meant to be sealed under glass, and Peggy, as always, would take only what she could carry.

**Author's Note:**

> Requiem  
> R.L. Stevenson
> 
> Under the wide and starry sky  
> Dig the grave and let me lie:  
> Glad did I live and gladly die,  
> And I laid me down with a will. 
> 
> This be the verse you 'grave for me:  
> Here he lies where he long'd to be;  
> Home is the sailor, home from the sea,  
> And the hunter home from the hill.


End file.
